Senate's doing one of the most ambitious media studies in history

"Our principle focus is to see whether and if so how public policy needs to change in order help to ensure that Canadian media remains healthy and diverse and independent," says Quebec Liberal Senator Joan Fraser, chair of the Senate's Transport and Communications Committee's media study. "In its own right, that's a pretty big challenge even though all we're looking at is public policy."

Launched in late April, the 12-member committee hopes to wrap up in spring 2004. But the media's radical metamorphosis in the last 30 years which includes globalization, technological change (i.e. the internet and all-news cable channels), concentration of ownership, convergence and the media's ever-changing role, rights and responsibilities—all fall within the study area.

It is a gargantuan set of issues and possibly the most ambitious Senate media study ever attempted, partially because the mandate covers communication in all forms—"radio, telephone, telegraph, wire, cable, microwave, wireless, television, satellite, broadcasting, post or any other means, method or form."

It also covers two prominent and hotly-debated policy voids—cross ownership or convergence and the internet.

"If you want to have a free press," Sen. Fraser says, "Then that free press has to be able to support itself."

Sustainability and public policy's relationship with it continues to be the nexus to many other concerns.

Senator Fraser has 30 years' bilingual experience in print and broadcast in a wide range of roles, including working as a business reporter. Perhaps being fired by Conrad Black while editor of Montreal's The Gazette also was a card in demonstrating her ability to resist pressure from vested interests.

"One of the dangers in an enquiry like this," Sen. Fraser says, "Is that you start out with a group of people who start out thinking the same thing and they gallop merrily down the road together. And maybe they're going the wrong way."

The last time the Senate undertook such a study was in 1970. Chaired by former Grit Senator Keith Davey, it sounded grave warnings about print chains and cross media ownership. It recommended creating press councils to support core journalistic ethics and principles and investigate complaints; creating a council to review media acquisitions presupposing that cross ownership and concentration are not in the public interest; and establishing a fund to support newer publications to help preclude single-newspaper towns and cities. Aside from creating some press councils, none of its recommendations were adopted.

Subsequently others studied the situation—the Kent Commission and the Task Force on Broadcasting (Caplan/Sauvageau, 1986). From 1980 to 1981 Tom Kent led the Royal Commission on Newspapers that put concentration under a microscope. It proposed creating a Canada Newspaper Act. The recommended legislation included a clause barring a single media company from acquiring more than five dailies and outlined strict regional geographic boundaries preventing multiple paper ownership in the same area.

"One measure would have made newspaper editors accountable to a community committee operating under the aegis of a minister of government," said Russell Mills, who was most recently a Neiman Fellow at Harvard University and is the former publisher of The Ottawa Citizen said in his testimony to the Senate Communications Committee on May 1.

"I fought this along with all other senior people in the newspaper industry. With the help of international press freedom organizations, that proposed act was eventually shelved."

"While there were some problems in the newspaper industry 20 years ago, that cure was far worse than the disease," he adds. "By reaching too far, the entire proposed law collapsed."

Mr. Mills warned the committee against making the same mistake.

"Recommendations that deal only with structure and avoid impinging on content," he added, "May have the greatest chance."

On June 11, 2003, Liberal MP Clifford Lincoln (Lac-Saint-Louis, Que.) and chair of the Canadian Heritage Committee, presented his committee's report on Canadian broadcasting to the Commons. Containing 97 recommendations, this report calls for a new act to replace the current three acts overseeing Canadian broadcasting (the Telecommunications Act, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications (CRTC) Act and the Broadcasting Act). Significantly, it also recommends creating a new department—communications—to dispel ongoing conflicts between Industry and Heritage, the two departments currently responsible. The committee strongly opposes increasing limits on foreign ownership (currently at 46.7 per cent), and notably, it recommends a moratorium on new licences to cross-media owners until this policy void is filled.

"There was some kind of synchronization in the sense of timing," says Ian Morrison, spokesperson for Friends of Canadian Broadcasting (FCB). Mr. Morrison sees Mr. Lincoln's recommendations, coming just as the Senate committee begins its work, as "putting down a doormat to say something needs to be done." It shows hope for a "potential virtuous link between the two studies," he adds.

The Senate committee is examining the issues from existing laws primarily affecting print, radio and TV, i.e. the Broadcasting Act, the Competition Act, the Foreign Investment Act, and the Income Tax Act. Along with defining regulatory bodies like the CRTC, this legislation demarcates foreign ownership limits, tax breaks based on Canadian content rules, and the content bases for broadcast licences.

To date, Sen. Fraser acknowledges that most witnesses thus far focus on ongoing contentious issues, i.e. concentration, foreign ownership and—as with the House of Commons Heritage Committee—the legislative/regulatory void on cross ownership or convergence. A few have raised the issue of accountability, Tom Kent suggesting legislation to set up a national press ombudsman.

The Senate Committee has already heard from Roger Landry, former publisher of La Presse; Donna Logan, director of UBC's School of Journalism; former Citizen publisher Russell Mills; Patrick Watson, former chair of the CBC; and various professors and independent producers. Possibly the most controversial recommendation thus far is Mr. Watson's–that the government should publish a national newspaper.

"It could function not only as a source of news about our national life and our international relations that are not well-covered in the popular press and popular media," Mr. Watson testified, "But also serve as a watchdog on the existing press."

Aside from the stark differences between broadcast and print production and the cost, Ms. Logan, herself a former CBC manager, publicly responded by suggesting that CBC already produces one—CBC.ca.

Journalists and others in the industry almost universally reject the idea of a state-run newspaper, not least because it would not address wider concerns.

Claire Hoy, a seasoned political author and newspaper columnist who writes a weekly column on the media for The Hill Times, suggests market forces compel consumers take responsibility for their choices in determining the kinds of journalism available.

"How many opinions do you want?" he says, pointing to the internet as a hothouse for opinion and perspective. Describing the Senate as "a bunch of appointed partisan hacks," Mr. Hoy insists that concentration problems were created by the very politicians now decrying the results.

"Foreign ownership rules should be nuked. Why does it matter to me who owns the paper?" Mr. Hoy adds. "People read a newspaper for a whole bunch of reasons, one of which is political bias, but that political bias comes from the owners and the board. It doesn't come from the citizenship of the owner."

Most Canadians still usually go to traditional media for their news, Mr. Mills testified to the committee. Hence examining ownership concentration of traditional media dominating the field is appropriate despite the internet.

"Using the internet as an excuse for inaction," is problematic, Mr. Mills said, since there is no evidence that people spend significantly more time on-line just because the internet's richness is available. Aside from exceptional circumstances like the invasion of Iraq, "a typical educated Canadian will spend about half an hour to three quarters of an hour a day with the news," he said.

John Urquhart, executive director of the Council of Canadians, contests the notion that media markets–and producers–exist independently.

"The market exists really–and always has existed–through public policy, through political policy," Mr. Urquhart says. "We would not have a CBC today, if it were not for political policy. We would have just a chain of private stations and probably all of them American owned."

"The whole purpose of the media is frankly, in a real sense, to be liberal. In order for it to have any kind of credibility in a democracy, it has to represent other voices at some level. And so the question then is, are you doing an adequate job of it?"

The current situation complicates disentangling issues, especially where a converged newsroom houses a chained paper. Concentration has been around for decades. Even some within converged organizations probably agree convergence has failed–it is no longer profitable, if it ever was. Were it to disappear–as many believe will eventually happen, through market losses or other means–combined with concentration, its destructive affects on journalism may not be so easily repaired.

"Concentration might have suggested threats in the past," says Joel Ruimy, executive director of Canadian Journalists for Free Expression (CJFE). "Now it actually demonstrates threats. There have been layoffs, contractions, the notion of centrally-produced editorials which then gave way to the notion of central news desks–what does this mean for the Canadian press if they have their own news services?"

At the time of Sen. Davey's hearings, convergence as we know it today did not exist.

"The largest company in Canada was not a major media provider," says Vincent Mosco, a professor of communications at the School of Journalism and Communications at Carleton University. "I'm talking here about Bell Canada Enterprises. It's absolutely unprecedented for the largest company here—historically, the monopoly telephone company—to own major channels [and] a major national newspaper. That's a massive concentration and ought to be of great concern to people."

Proportion and scale are the key words for Mr. Morrison, spokesperson for FCB. Canada may already have the highest media concentration in a western democracy. Mr. Morrison recalls that about a year ago, Gannett controlled about 10 per cent of the dailies in the United States and CanWest about 40 percent of English language dailies in Canada. (In the U.K., the largest single owner controls about 20-25 percent.).

All of the things the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) was considering earlier this month, "already exist in Canada," Mr. Morrison says.

On June 2, the FCC did rule to deregulate. The ruling allows cross ownership in a single location and increases by 10 per cent the so-called "network cap." Now a single media corporation can own TV stations totaling 45 percent of the national U.S. TV market.

"I think that the horse has left the stable already," says media-savvy Ken Rockburn, host of CPAC's Talk Politics. "To be honest, I can't imagine what they could do," he says, when asked what could be done in Canada now.

Coming from private radio, Mr. Rockburn remembers the ravages of over regulation on FM radio.

"The industry, in journalistic terms, just died," he says, adding that the challenge is to find the middle ground.

"Why would you want to buy the Post and the Citizen if you've got the same people writing the same stories," Mr. Rockburn adds. "From a consumer point, why would you want that?"

Based in Minneapolis, Mark Tronnes is the editor of the web site Cursor.org, arguably one of the best media sources in any medium worldwide. The site has received accolades from across the political spectrum. Evolving since its creation in 1998, Cursor.org is a tax-exempt charity that runs on donations and grants.

"I think the issue is the degree to which all of these people dominate the narrative and all cover the same stories in essentially the same way," says Mr. Tronnes, noting that the sole trait distinguishing cable news channels is marketing, not how each covers news.

As journalists who have worked across media know, newspapers remain critical to all these debates because most broadcast journalism continues to be generated from newspaper coverage.

"I believe strongly that newspapers matter," Sen. Fraser says. "All news and information media matter because news and information and analysis is absolutely essential to the functioning of a democracy. And newspapers matter in particular because in our system they are where the great bulk of the journalists are."

That said, Senator Fraser insists she remains acutely sensitive to staying on democratic side of the hairline dividing regulation/legislation and potential governmental editorial interference.

"I do not believe the state has any business in the newsrooms of the nation," she says, "not looking into–but in–that is acting in."

"As a member of the Canadian Senate, I tend to think that there is no area of Canadian society where we should be excluded from looking to see that the public interest is being served," Sen. Fraser says. "But as a long-time journalist, I still sometimes think of myself as a journalist."

Mr. Hoy suggests that local weeklies fill the void, if any exists at all, left by uniformity of chain-produced news.

"Local papers don't have the resources to get good local coverage," Prof. Mosco contends, and have a greater dependence on local advertisers than dailies. Since increasingly converged or chained media buy them up, they also become absorbed into the concentration, morphing into part of the problem, he adds.

In the last few years, Jim Creskey, publisher of The Hill Times, sold his interest in TheOttawa Xpress, a local weekly, to the Quebecor chain.

"I watched the effect that it had on that paper," says Mr. Creskey, who has observed that chaining damages the media's ability to provide "unexpected information rather than pack information" more than restrictions on foreign ownership. Although well-intentioned the latter have backfired, he says, and chaining dailies or weeklies affects enormous harm to a paper's regional voice.

"When you're rooted in a community, you have strong responsibilities to that community," Mr. Creskey adds. Chain owners and senior managers' addiction to the bottom-line is such that "they start finding ways to save money on the editorial product and to forget their responsibilities. Now how can a government roll that sort of thing back? I have no idea."

Peter Stockland, editor of The Gazette in Montreal, a CanWest paper, at the vortex of this ongoing controversy concurs that chaining has its impact but refutes any suggestion that journalistic principles or freedoms are curtailed in the process.

"There is now an expectation that we will work far more closely and collegially with our fellow editors than I think was the standard for many, many years in this chain of newspapers," says Mr. Stockland.

A reporter sent out today covers the story for the entire chain. In the past, each paper may have sent a reporter. Underlying this setup is the questionable belief that any chain reporter anywhere understands the relevant issues to all other locations in the chain.

"You have a structural bias there," says Mr. Urquhart of the Council of Canadians, "In that one way or another," chaining or cross ownership "eventually, ensures a conformity of perspectives. You inevitably move towards the same people determining what constitutes news, how it will be covered, and which views will be carried right through in every format, in every form of media."

The Kent report refereed to "editorial concentration," lamenting the loss of diverse Parliamentary correspondents, a blood-letting that lead to anemic coverage through too many dailies using The Canadian Press wire reports to cover substantive political issues and Parliamentary debate.

Although written over 20 years ago, this hardly reads like science fiction or ancient history today.

The central question is about critical mass, Mr. Ruimy of CJFE maintains, wondering if this is something Canada still has.

Enough journalists from different media covering the Hill from varying perspectives keeps everyone honest and ensures journalists will break stories to distinguish themselves from the pack, Mr. Ruimy says. Fewer journalists trying to cover daily Question Period, some bigger committees and also filing more stories than before, contracts the impetus to breaking news, he says, reducing the competition and affecting quality.

Pointing to the recent layoffs of veteran highly-esteemed journalists by CanWest and the CBC, he contends the country has lost a natural process. Historically, new journalists to the Hill had the distinct advantage of working in an environment with experienced colleagues.

The veterans' loss "suggests that there's expertise and experience being lost to economic imperatives," Mr. Ruimy says. In recently-axing some veteran local CBC-TV reporters, CBC management stated a need for more camera time in Ottawa and intends to hire video journalists (presumably younger and at starting pay scales, cheaper).

Mr. Ruimy sees nothing sinister in these developments, suggesting that in the area of political reporting the cuts fall "more in the realm of unintended consequences," and that the corporations involved will lose listeners/readers. Ten years hence, he believes convergence will be extinct.

"You know as well as I do that reporters have a natural tendency to be very wary of power," Sen. Fraser says. She was asking witness Roger Landry, former publisher of La Presse, about the relationship between the paper's owner at the time—Paul Desmarais Sr. of Power Corporation—Mr. Landry, and journalists. "And when that power is represented by their employer, well, how could a reporter working at La Presse be certain that he was free, as free when talking about Power Corporation's interests as those of anybody else?"

At the time, Mr. Landry says, unions were a formidable force in Quebec, and the question of interference was simply a non-issue.

Also "there was a philosophy in our shop," Mr. Landry testified. "A written statement—in place since 1976. It clearly states that La Presse is there to inform people and that reporters have total freedom, but that it will always be Canadian. That was back in 1976, at the time the sovereigntists and the separatist movement were on the rise."

Speaking about the recent CanWest layoffs, Mr. Rockburn suggests these "reverberated more in the journalistic community because of the people who got let go."

"Everybody has certain anxieties about how quickly you can be slapped down," he says. "When you see established journalists like that get smoked so easily, you start thinking holy cats! What does this mean?"

How reader interest, market interest and corporate interest converge or collide in a chain-owned newspaper raises another series of questions that only proliferate when combined with a cross ownership situation.

The Gazette is one of the few papers in the country, according to Mr. Stockland, to now have a "readership development editor" on its masthead.

"The corporate interest is in putting out a newspaper that Montrealers want to read," says Mr. Stockland. "And our interest is in finding out—we don't do news by Gallup or anything—but we do have people, designated people on our staff, who are researchers trained in this stuff who know how to gather and interpret data, who do that for us."

Mr. Stockland balked at the suggestion that some may call this market research, particularly since as a CanWest paper, this information is also in the hands of Global TV.

"If someone wanted to slap some kind of epithet that this is market research, well you know what? I want to put out a newspaper that people want to read."

The current policy vacuum around the internet concerns many media watchers. Mr. Urquhart stresses that to date, the Internet has largely been a financial loss for big media corporations.

"Any discussion around regulation of the internet has to start from a question about regulation for whom, in whose interests," Mr. Urquhart says. "If it's in the interests of corporations, you can bet it is going to be inimical to the interests, the democratic interests, of the public at large."

In 1999, the CRTC ruled that streaming audio and video do not require regulation since that occurs through existing regulation of conventional broadcasters.

"We haven't seen a migration of eyeballs and advertising monies," to the internet from traditional broadcast media, says Denis Carmel, CRTC spokesman. "And therefore a jeopardy of the existing system." Back in 1999, many broadcasters feared precisely that. Indeed in the face of new technologies, ad revenues for broadcasting have generally remained far more stable than for print media.

Along with economic concerns, the internet has arguably allowed for a "new journalism," that by comparison raises the standard for context and history (or archiving).

Yet the great irony about sites like Cursor.org is that over 90 per cent of its content is pulled from newspapers, radio and TV transcripts. Editor Mr. Tronnes patrols the web, writing story outlines with links to articles posted by the original source. While the site critiques traditional media, it cannot exist without it.

"The story is the dominant narrative," says Mr. Tronnes. "The raw material is basically taken from old media because they have the reporting resources. And then the story about the story comes from all over the place."

The site features extensive sidebar links to newspapers, columnists or alternative sources relevant to given issues, civilian body counts from in wars, complied done by academics, for instance.

"Since everything is on the internet, the issue is contextualization because everything's there," Mr. Tronnes says. "You have everything to choose from. You don't have everything to choose from in any other medium."

Both Mr. Tronnes and Mr. Mosco suggest a legislative vacuum around the internet may tempt governments or corporations to control access or the pipeline itself.

Mr. Tronnes notes newspaper websites now requiring paid subscriptions in order to view the entire article, noting that Britain's The Independent put up a wall sparking a "free [Robert] Fisk" movement.

If the public is willing to pay to read stories on-line, more media will do this, Mr. Tronnes says. "But it goes so against the spirit of the internet," he adds.

"I can see it happening—but on the other hand, it's just almost too awful to imagine. I'd rather not even think about the possibility."

He suggests constructive internet legislation would mandate on-line posting of TV and radio transcripts as opposed to real-audio or video, to allow people to read, link to and respond to the reports and thus engender a greater diversity of opinions and perspectives.

"If we believe that this is a technology that's going to increase the marketplace of ideas," Mr. Mosco says, "Then we have to insure that everyone has access to it." Public policy can ensure all Canadians have access to broadband communications, he insists, regardless of their income.

"With an area as complex as this one and that has been in such a state of such frequent change as this one," Sen. Fraser says, "You really have to think very, very, very carefully about it."

Referring to ongoing apprehensions about the situation in rural Canada and the U.S. media's impact on our media, Sen. Gustafson also echoes an historic question about the value of Senate committees.

"A Committee can recommend anything," he says, "but whether government would move on it and pass it into a regulation or a law...."

Many doubting this Senate Committee's value base their skepticism not on its quality or thoughtfulness but on this very question.

"I certainly know that the person heading this one up is an extraordinarily capable person," says Mr. Stockland, adding that he has "tremendous respect" for Senate Committees.

"Obviously they'll produce a report," he continues. "Will that produce a chain reaction or some kind of catalytic event? Probably not."

CBE's Mr. Morrison stands as a lone ranger, believing public concern combined with the Senate Committee's work, if done properly, could have a profound impact. He notes that a previous committee's findings led to the government overruling the CRTC on satellite broadcasting.

"We have a general election most likely taking place 10 to 12 months from now. We have a change in Prime Minister apparently in February," Mr. Morrison says. "We have a Liberal leader selected in September and a national convention in November, with nothing to do other than to debate policy."

"You've got a rise in the influence of the NDP. So you've got a Liberal government going into an election, looking over its other shoulder, for the first time in a decade."

"So we're actually at a time of potentially a rapid change," he adds. "The metaphor would be of a tidal change."

The editors of The Globe and Mail, the National Post and the managing editor of The Toronto Star declined to be interviewed for this story.